Disentangling the Personal Agenda: Identity and School Board Members’ Perceptions of Problems and Solutions

ABSTRACT

Using data drawn from a 2009 nationwide survey of school board members, this study asks three questions: What are the policy priorities of school board members? How do members’ identities predict priorities? Lastly, is this relationship moderated by district context? Our results demonstrate that a variety of characteristics predict perceptions of issue urgency and cogent policy solutions for addressing student achievement. We also find evidence that the translation of Black identity to perceptions is moderated by district context. Our results indicate that attention to board members’ identities may be critical for developing effectively functioning boards and understanding local education policy.

Notes

1. In addition, intra-class correlations for critical models in our analysis, using our categorical outcomes as continuous variables in ordinary least squares regression and incorporating person- and district-level controls, were small enough to assure us that in our final models, the proportion of remaining variance explained by board clusters was small enough to validate using single-level modeling. Similar results were found for variance components models.

2. The parallel regression assumption for ordinal logistic regression implies that the estimate also holds for other dichotomizations of the outcomes, e.g., below “Fifth rank” versus “Fourth rank” or higher, as well as below “Fourth rank” versus “Third rank” or higher.

3. By “other non-White racial identity,” we are referring to people who indicated their racial identity as either Hispanic or Latino(a), Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, or other.

4. We obtained this number from National Center for Education Statistics data.